Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Manifest’ On NBC, About A Flight That Reappears After Being Gone For Five Years

Since Lost premiered 14 (!) years ago, networks have been falling all over themselves to create a multi-layered mystery that they can call their own. It’s a format that endures, even though most of the attempts have missed the mark. The latest attempt is Manifest on NBC. Can it be Lost for the 2010s and beyond?

MANIFEST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The waiting area at an airport. A graphic says “April 7, 2013”, and a voice over goes, “No one can explain what happened to us on April 7, 2013. Some people thought it was impossible. Others called it a miracle. All I know is, it was the day my life changed forever.”

The Gist: The woman doing the voice over is Michaela Stone (Melissa Roxburgh), who’s on a family vacation with her parents, brother Ben (Josh Dallas), his wife Grace (Athena Karkanis) and their twins, Olive and Cal (Jack Messina). Cal has leukemia that’s not responding to treatment, his parents are searching for a cure, and Michaela herself is suffering PTSD from an accident she had months earlier. Plus, her mother is pressuring her to marry her boyfriend Jared (J.R. Ramirez).

She so wants to stay away from home she voluntarily gets bumped from the overbooked flight. Ben does too, hoping the credit can get Cal to the Mayo Clinic. Cal goes with his dad, because that’s what Cal does.

The flight hits extreme turbulence, which panics everyone involved but the plane rights itself. When it tries to land, though, the air traffic controllers are shocked to hear from them. When they finally do land, the authorities tell the pilots and everyone on the flight that it’s now 2018. That’s right: The flight had been missing for five-and-a-half years.

There are, as you might expect, many implications at play here. The people on the flight feel like only a few hours have passed, so its shocking to see how much has changed. Cal is still 11 but Olive (Luna Blaise) is now in high school. Ben and Michaela’s mother is dead. There’s an experimental treatment for Cal which might actually work — the research for which was done by someone else on the flight, Saanvi Bahl (Parveen Kaur). Jared has moved on and, as we see later, Grace has, as well.

But the biggest change is that Michaela hears voices in her head imploring her to do things like let dogs out of a junkyard she passes. She’s a cop, so breaking in to let them out isn’t exactly in her wheelhouse. But Ben reluctantly admits to hearing the voices, too. And, as they soon find out, everyone else on the flight hears those voices, too.

Our Take: It’s obvious that Manifest, produced by Robert Zemeckis, Jeff Rake and Jack Rapke, is trying to be a 2010s Lost. A mysterious flight, a mystery that goes even deeper than what happened with that flight, and all the implications that flight would have on the people that were on it.

It’s an interesting take, with the five year gap becoming the driver for all sorts of stories. It helps that the lives of Michaela and Ben are already established as being complicated before fate threw them both (and Cal) on that flight. How can Michaela resolve things with her demanding mother now that she’s no longer around? Does Jared go back to her, even though he’s married? How does Olive get to know her father and brother again? And does Grace tell Ben about her boyfriend?

The stuff about the voices in the passengers’ heads was where the show dropped the ball. Seeing these actors cringe in pain as the voices got louder made us cringe in pain just watching it. And the fact that letting the dogs out of the junkyard led Michaela to another, more important discovery, feels like procedural storytelling at its worst. But that will likely be the push going forward, so the hope here is that as the people on the flight get to know that voice, the story will go in some better directions.

Sex and Skin: Nothing.

Parting Shot: As the people from the flight gather after all having the same vision, they see the plane on the tarmac, having been torn apart by the feds and put back together again. Then, it explodes. Someone doesn’t want people finding out what happened.

Sleeper Star: Parveen Kuar’s side story about how she gets Cal into the study she was a part of is intriguing, but feels tacked on in the pilot. Let’s hope they give it more attention going forward.

Most Pilot-y Line: Michaela is at her local church, and she looks in a Bible to see her mother’s favorite passage: “God causes all things to work together for good.” After she has a vision of the plane on the tarmac, she asks “Can I keep this?”

Our Call: STREAM IT. There’s enough intrigue here to keep watching, but Manifest only has a couple of episodes to get the tone right, or else people will check out.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Manifest on Hulu